The 10 Top Selling Consoles Ever

have you ever wondered how popular some of your favorite consoles actually are? this hub is to show what the 10 most popular consoles ever sold are, and just how many of them were sold worldwide. Enjoy

Release Date - 2006

Units Sold - 51.8 million

Most Popular Game (to date) - Gran Turismo 5

Just making the list, the PS3 is sony's 3rd console to date, is the successor to their immensly popular Playstation 2 and is in the 7th generation of consoles. It was brought out as sony's compitition to the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii and is the only 7th gen console to have a built in blu-ray player. Like the Xbox 360 the majority of the PS3's target audiance for games is about 15 upwards so mainly appeals to teenagers and up. although its 10th now i think there's still more to see from it as time goes on.

Release Date - 2005

Units Sold - 55 million

Most Popular Game (to date) - Call of Duty: Black Ops

Successor to the Xbox the Xbox 360 is Microsoft's second console released, On Release of the console it instantly sold out everywhere worldwide except Japan. Why is the 360 9th then? The Xbox ranks 9th because its main target audience is from about 15 upwards, and most of the years big releases are generally games like Call of Duty or Gears of War which although the sell millions of copies, still won't match up to the amount a game with a lower age rating would.

Release Date - 1983

Units Sold - 61.91 Million

Most Popular Game (to date) - Super Mario Bros.

predessor of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), The NES is one of those consoles that you will forever remember as part of your childhood. With a selection of classic titles that still remain used franchises to this day its not surprising that the NES sold so many copies and this shows aswell. Super Mario Bros. Sold a massive 40.24 Million copies which beats sales of some of the best selling games of today and to top it all it was named the 2009 single greatest video game console in history by IGN

Release date - 2004

Units Sold - 72.99 million

Most Popular Game (to date) - Monster Hunter Portable 3rd(Japan Only), Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (Worldwide)s

With 2 different designs (original and slim) the Sony PSP is the only handheld console created by sony, With its lightweight design it may not by any means be the smallest of consoles to carry around with you but the quality of the screen is worth it being a little chunky. This was slighty fixed with the release of the slim version which made the console slimmer and lighter than the original. The PSP GO was then brought out as an updated version getting rid of the UMD games (which i thought was a good idea, its the only handheld to use disk games) and changing it to downloading games from an online store. With this the consoles internal hard drive space was increased and you could also expand the memory with up to a 16GB SD card. Finally to finish, It has inbuilt Wi-Fi which can be used not only to play games online but also to do anything from browsing the net to facebook to youtube. An incredibly versitile console.

Release date - 2001

Units Sold - 81.51 million

Most Popular Game (to date) - Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire

The Gameboy Advance was Nintendo's 3rd handheld console after the Oringinal Gameboy and Then The Gameboy Color. With the release of the Gameboy Advance we saw the new generation of games which were in new smaller cartridges than those of the original and color, this meant that they were more compact and lightweight to store meaning that your old gameboy game case could suddenly fit twice as many games in it (had a case for the gameboy and 4 games ended up managing to fit about 30 games in it). Unsurprisingly one of the Pokemon Series was the most popular game on the GBA but thats been the case since the days of the original games being released. in 2005 an updated Gameboy Advance SP was brought out, the main 2 new points being it was now more compact (a square rather than the strange shape of the original advance) with a flipdown lid, and the second being it now had a backlight allowing you to play it where ever and whenever (i remember many nights sitting with a torch to play more original Gameboy Advance). The Gameboy Advance/ SP was my favorite generation of handhelds, with some of my all time favorite games on it, with the benifit of it using cartridge games which are much harder to damage or break than the disks that most consoles use.

Release date - 2006

Units Sold - 87.57 million

Most Popular Game - Wii Sports(comes with the consoles), Mario Kart Wii

On release the Nintendo Wii had a lot going for it, it was the first console with motion detection and surprisingly its the only one of the 7th generation consoles that's fully backwards compatible. With the new Zelda game on the launch game lineup pretty much all Nintendo fans rushed out to get one. In the UK this resulted in them being sold out for a few months strait whilst the supply was trying to catch up to the incredible demand. The Wii is Nintendo's 7th generation console brought out to compete with the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and from the look of it, its done just that. The Wii is now the most sold of the 3 consoles and this is because Nintendo are aiming at a much wider audiance, looking at not only the main games of the year but also aiming to draw in younger kids and adults. This has given them the edge over the other consoles in terms of sales however because of this tactic theres no longer any mainstream, big-name games left for the people. . The Wii was the successor to the Nintendo Gamecube, and its predecessor has been annouced, the Wii U which looks like a promising console but i guess we'll have to wait and see how it turns out.

Release date - 1994

Units Sold - 102.49 million

Most Popular Game - Gran Turismo

The Playstation was truly a brilliant console and i can honestly say it managed to take up most of mine time growing up. But this is because of a couple things firstly it had an amazing game selection, with old games like crash bandicoot it makes you wonder why so many half-assed games are showing up today. The Playstation's controller had a simplistic yet effective design making it easy to use and on top of this the setup for the games worked well and allowed you to play games comfortably unlike some of the more recent controllers (look at the Xbox 360 you need about 4 hands to play some games). The list of games for it was enourmous aswell and amongst them were titles such as crash bandicoot, final fantasy and gran turismo all of which led them it to dominate the market and eventually make the N64 sadly fade from our view.

Release date - Gameboy: 1989 Gameboy Color: 1998

Units Sold - 118.69 million

Most Popular Game - Tetris

The original Gameboy was one of the first handheld console on the market and for its time was a joy to play. With a simple button layout which consisted of 4 buttons (if you include start and select) and a D-pad to control movement. The Gameboy quickly took off due to it being bundled with Tetris(which sold an impressive 35 million copies). Later on 3 of the Pokemon titles (red, blue and yellow) were released, aswell as Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. Even with the success of it when you look at what the gameboy actually used it's amazing how well it worked, it had 8-bit sound a 66mm screen and a 2-bit color scale (which gave 4 shades of gray).

Almost a decade later Nintendo released their second version, the Gameboy Colour. The Color was backwards compatiable, could display colors, was smaller and was more lightweight than its predecessor however for all of this effort i found that there wasn't really a good selection of games ever out for it. This lead to spending most of the time using it on original Gameboy games which, intrestingly, added some color to the original games.

Release date - 2004

Units Sold - 147.86 million

Most Popular Game - New Super Mario Bros.

The Nintendo DS looked appealing from the start, its got 2 screens and one of them is a touch screen which you can effectively use using a stylus, although some games use it effectively the majority of them use the touchscreen for minor parts such as menus and general bits and bobs however games like the Castlevania series and The World Ends With You make full use of its capabilitys and show you exactly what it can do. The World Ends With You does this by showing off an incredibly well designed battle system using different motions on the touchscreen to attack in various ways, hell the top screens pretty much just for the bigger view its that unused (anyway im just rambling now). As expected from a newer generation console the DS is also backwards compatible with the Gameboy Advance games, tho strangely not with any games further back than that and this is completely removed from the later DSi model that was brought out. Finally also as expected the DS has had a few versions brough out on the way after the original, the DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL were all released (in that order) the changes being the DS Lite was a slightly better, more rectangular shape making it nicer to use. The DSi removes the backwards capabilitys of the DS and instead gives it a camera (why?) and the DSi XL is the same but, as the name suggests, just has a much bigger screen.

Release Date - 2000

Units Sold - 154.59 Million

Most Popular Game - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The PS2 was just one of them consoles, i dont think i knew anyone without one of these back when they were popular and to be honest i can understand why. The same controller layout was kept for this console the only difference was duelshock controllers were now standard meaning your old PS1 controllers would only work on limited games, however it still kept the backwards capability to play PS1 games aswell as audio CDs and to top it off you could now also play DVDs on you PS2 console. The game selection was brilliant aswell with a massive variety of games in general and even then the amount of games in each genre was as impressive. For a console thats 11 years old you can truly say that the PS2 has held its ground and is worthy of the position of the best selling console ever.